Alex Ruthmann’s Blog

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As a middle school general music teacher I have wrestled with how to engage my students in meaningful composing experiences. In looking for ways to compose with students, it seemed that many of the approaches to composing I read about were disconnected from the real-world musicality I saw daily in the music my students created at home and in my classes. This disconnect prompted me to look for ways of “bridging the gap” between the students’ musical worlds outside of music class with in-class composing experiences.

This article covers my work teaching at the Cranbrook Kingswood Middle School, where all performing arts classes are scheduled during the same hour of the day. The choral and instrumental rooms are filled with students in band, orchestra, and choir. Because no music rooms were available, when I was asked to teach a general music class for students not involved in performance-based music classes, I designed a composing-based class, Composers Workshop, taught in our library computer lab.

Many resources for and approaches to composing with technology require teachers to spend a large amount of time instructing students how to use the software and hardware. Technologies described in many resources are also often costly or require complex procedures in order to use them in the classroom. Further, many approaches to teaching music with technology center around notation of musical ideas, rooted in European classical notions of composing (composing ABA pieces or restricting composing tasks to predetermined rhythmic values). These approaches require students to have a sophisticated knowledge of standard music notation and a fluency working with rhythms and pitches before being able to explore and express their musical ideas through broader musical dimensions like form, texture, mood, and style. While this knowledge was common among many students who focused on music, it was important that the Composers Workshop not assume or require that knowledge.

At my school, the students enrolled in these classes came without much interest in performing, working with notation, or studying classical music. Many saw themselves as “failed” musicians, placed in a general music class because they had not succeeded in or desired to continue with traditional performance-based music classes. Though they no longer had the desire to perform in traditional school ensembles, they were excited about having the opportunity to create music that might be personally meaningful to them.

Observation taught me that Cranbrook students were immersed in a rich and complex musical “sound world”––a world they understood, knew, and cared about intimately and intensely. Music was constantly radiating from them as they scurried through the halls. They sang, danced, stole moments to listen to music on their iPods between (and sometimes during) classes. They were always discussing the latest artist, song, or music video. I found myself trying to find ways to design curriculum that engaged them in composing experiences that drew upon their music and musical ideas. Clearly these students were musical beings, and I knew I could find ways to foster their musicality and develop their personal musicianship.
This stance posed several challenges:

• In what ways could composing for personal expression be a transformative experience? How could this be fostered?

• How could the voice and needs of students guide lessons?

• How could the deep and complex musical understandings that these students brought to class help them develop as musicians and composers?

• What tools engage students in organizing sound in musical and meaningful ways?

Investigating Parallels Between Writing and Composing

Many parallels exist between processes of composing music at a computer and processes of literary writing. Organizing sounds and organizing words can be a solo process between an individual and the medium for composing. In many music technology classrooms teachers structure environments such that each student works individually at a computer and keyboard composing music as a solo process. Musical thinking (thinking in sound) and linguistic thinking (thinking in words) are personal creative processes, yet both occur within social and cultural contexts. Noting these parallels, I began to think about connections between the whole language approach to writing used and how I might take this into my music classroom.

In whole language, students work individually as they learn to write, yet are supported through collaborative scaffolding and support from the teacher and their peers. At the earliest stages, students tell their stories and attempt to write them down using pictures, drawings, and invented notation. Students write about topics that are personally meaningful to them, learning from their own writing, the writing of their peers, their teacher, and their family, as well as through the study of literature written by published authors. An important subset of whole language work to emerge in the past twenty years is the writers’ workshops. Lucy Calkins and Nancie Atwell are two influential teachers and researchers whose ideas underpin the structures and approaches used in many writers’ workshops in schools today.

In writers’ workshops students spend most of their time writing and reading. The teacher facilitates their growth as writers through mini-lessons, share sessions, and conferring sessions tailored to meet the needs that emerge as the writers engage in their work. As a result, students’ original ideas and writings become the source of the curriculum. However, students in these settings do not spend the entire class time freewriting. Structures are built into the classroom experience to provide opportunities for students to share writing in progress and get feedback and support from teacher and peers. Revision and extension of students’ writing occurs throughout the process of writing, in consultation with the teacher and peers. Lessons are not organized by uniform, prescriptive assignments, but rather facilitated emergently and tailored to the students’ interests and needs as writers. In this way, the direction of the curriculum and successive projects are informed by the students’ emergent needs as developing writers.

The Composers’ Workshop

Inspired by writers’ workshop approaches, I developed a set of guidelines to frame an approach to facilitating a composers’ workshop in my classroom. The central activities in this workshop are composing, improvising, and performing with synthesizers, student voices, and loop-based music software. Analytical listening experiences, genre studies, and interdisciplinary units support these experiences.

The broad curricular goal of the composers’ workshop is to engage students collaboratively in:
1. Organizing and expressing musical ideas and feelings through sound—with real-world, authentic reasons for and means of composing.
2. Listening to and analyzing musical works appropriate to students’ interests and experiences, drawn from a broad spectrum of sources.
3. Studying processes of experienced music creators through listening to, performing, and analyzing their music, as well as being informed by creator accounts of process.

I chose to use loop-based music software programs like Super Duper Music Looper and Sony Acid Music Studio, because their design enables students to start organizing sounds that are recognizable and meaningful right from the beginning. Using a painting metaphor, students select sounds from a library of orchestrated musical ideas called loops and brush them in layers on the screen, organizing their compositions both visually and aurally. With this kind of software, students are not limited by lack of instrumental technique or prior experience with music notation. While students do not initially compose at the level of individual pitches or rhythms, working with loops enables students to begin creating with broader musical dimensions of texture, form, mood, and affect. As our semester progresses, students begin to add their own original melodies and musical ideas to their loop-based compositions through work with synthesizers and voices.

Initial student compositions with loop-based software often emulate musical styles and genres popular with the students. As a result, many of the first listening experiences for these students are drawn from genres and artists that they know well and start to imitate in their compositions. Musical exemplars drawn from a wide range of styles, cultures, and genres are chosen based on the compositional problems students encounter when creating their pieces.

In many classes, initial composing challenges have included investigating how to create interesting introductions, generate variety, and creatively end students’ pieces.
When listening to musical exemplars, I have students listen with an ear for the musical decisions and processes that artists, sound engineers, and producers make when crafting their pieces. These listening experiences open the door for further dialogue on and study of the multiplicity of musical roles that are a part of creating today’s popular music. Having students investigate accounts of the processes that audio engineers, producers, songwriters, film score composers, and studio musicians go through when creating music has proven to be very informative and has helped students learn the skills to more accurately realize the music they have in their heads. Useful resources for these accounts of process can be found in trade magazines like Electronic Musician and Remix, as well as the books Temples of Sound and Inside Classic Rock Tracks. For detailed and informative accounts of the processes film scorers and sound designers use when creating music for film and video games, see Jon Savage’s Sound2Picture and Sound2Game resources (www.sound2picture.net and www.sound2game.net).

In our composers’ workshop the process of composing is defined broadly as organizing sound musically for personal expression. While initial composing experiences are with musical loops, as students progress through the trimester they explore and add original melodies and musical ideas via their voices and synthesizers. Parameters for composing experiences are drawn from the musical structures of genres and styles that interest the students. The music that students create is directly influenced by the structural characteristics of the musical exemplars we analyze together and individually in class.

Inside the Composers’ Workshop

Initial Experiences

On the first day of Composers’ Workshop, students and teacher work with loop-based software together to create a collaborative composition. Projecting my computer screen, I model how to find and select sounds in the software and lead the class in making decisions about how to structure our music. We discuss questions such as: What kind of piece do we want to create? What sounds do we want to start with? How can we make this more interesting? The experience enables students to experience the software in an authentic way. This contrasts with teaching students to use the software feature by feature. It has been my experience that students quickly learn how to use the software, and they start creating music immediately.

After our first composing experience, students are free to explore and experiment, leading toward experimentation with musical ideas. Many students choose to explore together in pairs or in threes. In order to know their sonic choices, plenty of time needs to be provided to explore the sounds included with the software program . At this level of experience with the process, I have observed students create many short compositions as part of their exploration of the software. This exploring/experimenting time provides the teacher a useful window into the musical thinking and understanding of my students. As they begin to compose, I walk around the room looking for visual and aural cues about how they are choosing to organize sound. Are they thinking in sound or creating music visually? In what ways do they understand the musical structures they create? How do they understand balance? How does their prior musical experience connect with their initial compositional efforts?

Looking in on the students’ composing creates an opportunity for dialogue about their composing. We talk about their process of composing and musical intent in order to better understand how they create and what meanings they are constructing and expressing through their compositions. Insights drawn from these initial dialogues help me identify strategies I can use to facilitate their future composing by helping me identify listening experiences that might support their work or techniques they might use to better achieve their musical ideas. These approaches start to exemplify my adaptation of the Writers’ workshop to composition.

Structure of the Composers’ Workshop

Writers’ workshops are often organized by a set of pedagogical structures designed to help guide an emergent curriculum and help students further their ability as writers. Several structures that have been useful in our composers’ workshop center around teaching through “mini-lessons” and “conferring,” sharing and celebrating student work in class and through online galleries, and structuring composing experiences around genre studies. First, we will take a more in-depth look at the nature of initial experiences.

Mini-lessons

Instead of teaching through traditional whole class lessons that may or may not be related to the students’ immediate needs as developing composers, I teach through short 5 to 10 minute mini-lessons at the beginning or end of class sessions. These mini-lessons center around issues relevant to the entire class—for example, how to save their work, how to solve a common compositional problem, or to set parameters for composing projects. Throughout the course, I also design mini-lessons for smaller groups or individual students to meet their personal, immediate needs as composers. Many of these initial mini-lessons are related to musical problems students are having with their compositions, or teaching more advanced features of the software such as how to record a vocal track, add a fade-in or fade-out, or how to copy musical material. These technology skills are taught directly to a few students, who take their expertise in that skill to teach other students in the class.

Musical mini-lessons often help students extend and more accurately realize their compositional ideas. These generally focus on:
• Creating interesting introductions
• Exploring repetition contrast as a means to create variety
• Working with balance (fading) and panning (placement of sound in a left/right stereo field)
• Refining transitions
• Developing convincing endings

Many musical mini-lessons involve listening to and analyzing musical exemplars that help illustrate these concepts in the context of a piece of music. Since different students have different needs at different times, the use of an online music service has been useful in our classroom. As students encounter various compositional problems, I try to find recordings of musical exemplars on the online music service where the analysis of that piece may help the student achieve their musical goals. I share musical exemplars with students to provide individually tailored listening lessons and help develop critical listening skills through learning from musical recordings.

Teaching through mini-lessons targeted to individual or small groups of students has helped to not interrupt the musical flow of the students’ compositional work. As a result, I have more time to provide individual feedback and support to students as they compose, and they have more time for composing. The students themselves also offer their own mini-lessons to peers when they have problems. Much of the time, the students seek their peers out for help before asking me.

Conferring

When students are working on their compositions, I circulate throughout the room checking in from time to time to confer with them as they compose. During these sessions we dialogue about their musical intent and the processes they are using to create their music. These conferences focus students on developing strategies for furthering their work and better realizing their compositional ideas. I take care not to impose my ideas or imply that they need to revise their compositions, but to instead provide suggestions that help them better express their musical intent. One of my first questions is usually, “Is there anything that you would like me to listen for or know about before I listen?” This provides an opportunity for students to seek my help with particular aspects of their composing process. When finished listening to their compositions, I share my impressions of what I hear and offer my perspective on how to solve their musical problems. If students choose not to accept my ideas, that is fine since it is their composition and personal expression.

Conferences about compositions also occur among students. As they become more experienced composers, they often seek out peers for help or to share and discuss their work. As work progresses, some students become known for particular strengths in the composing process—creating endings, balancing sounds, adding key changes, etc. These students are then sought by peers, and in turn conference with them on how to improve their pieces. Use of conferring by both teacher and students fosters a culture of collaboration in which students and teacher learn how to better scaffold composing side-by-side with one another and develop skills in peer scaffolding. Most importantly, perhaps, is the reality that students themselves become authorities. The sources of knowledge and opportunities for growth become far more powerful than were I to call all the shots as a teacher.

Allowing students to freely move from computer to computer has been an important aspect in enabling students to confer with one another. The classroom is organized with computers lining the perimeter of the room, rather than in rows. This arrangement enables students to view the work of other students and easily move from one part of the room to the other. Through the use of headphone splitters, students often choose to work collaboratively in pairs—occasionally even in groups of 3 or 4. Multiple students and the teacher can also confer at the same time, teaching and learning from one another throughout conferring sessions.

Share Sessions and Online Galleries

As class continues, we gather together to share compositions as a whole class. Share sessions often serve as a platform for furthering understanding of a particular compositional technique or approach to creating. The students lead these presentations as they share their pieces and processes of creating. These sessions are learning opportunities for both teacher and students. As listeners, students come to better understand peers’ compositional intent and musical decisions. From these share sessions, the teacher can identify strengths and weaknesses in the class’ musical understanding. These insights are then used to design future compositional experiences centered around developing more sophisticated approaches to composing and more musical compositions.

As compositions are completed, opportunities are provided for sharing and publishing student work online through media galleries. Students submit to the teacher compositions they would like published on the class website. I help students publish any piece that they would like published, regardless of “quality.” This online gallery is not a place for only the best compositions; it is an educational space for students to learn from each other’s pieces. Once online, students can listen to and comment on these compositions at home outside of class time. Sometimes students post pieces in progress, but for the most part, works are posted when deemed “finished” by the composer. Once online, students can listen to compositions posted by their own classmates as well as compositions written by students in other classes, enlarging the possibilities for work they can hear by allowing them to hear other grades and classes’ work. Students are encouraged to listen to pieces published online for ideas to further their own work, to make comments, and to share with their friends and family. The real world publishing of students’ music on the Internet seems to contribute to their motivation in class.

Along with turning in audio files of the compositions, students are asked to reflect upon the processes they used when composing. I ask them to share a short statement of the creative intent and story behind the composition, the challenges they faced, a short statement about how they used to the technology to compose, and finally a self-evaluation of their composition sharing what they liked best and what they’d like help on improving, if anything. A student is successful if they achieve the goals of the assignment as well as their compositional intent. Observations of students while they compose coupled with the final recording of their composition and self-evaluation provide additional opportunities to assess each students’ development as a composer.

Celebration Sessions

At the end of major projects and at the end of the term, we have a large celebration session where the students’ best compositions (in the opinion of the students) are published in a special online gallery and on CD. These sessions are purely celebratory—not a place to discuss process, product, or technique. These sessions are not meant as teaching experiences, but instead as opportunities to enjoy one another’s pieces and to reinforce students’ self-concept as creative musicians.

Genre Studies

Not all parameters for composing emerge from the students’ work. At the beginning of the course, I like to see what kinds of music students create initially in order get to know them and understand their prior musical experiences. After a few weeks of free composing and exploration of the tools, we start a major project—often interdisciplinary in nature or focused around a particular genre well suited to composing with the technology we have. Some of our genre studies have centered on the genres of techno, film music, sound design, and popular songs. During these studies, recordings of musical exemplars drawn from these genres are shared with and studied by the class. Students work together in groups to become experts in specific genres. They analyze a musical exemplar drawn from a particular genre for its structural and expressive qualities, as well as investigate the piece’s historical and cultural context. Students’ analyses of these musical exemplars are then shared with the entire class providing guidance on how to create their own pieces within this genre.

The structures of mini-lessons, conferring, share sessions and online galleries, and genre studies help have helped students better realize their musical ideas in supportive and collaborative ways. Through individualized mini-lessons and conferring sessions, the compositional needs of the students are addressed emergently and in personally relevant ways. Over a semester of composing experiences, students create a number of compositions in an environment where they can further their musical understanding through composing personally meaningful music. Future compositional projects go beyond free composing with loop software to interdisciplinary projects and the integration of synthesizers and students’ voices, eventually moving on to notation-based software if students have the need.

Ways to Start Your Own Composers’ Workshop

In a writers’ workshop, the teacher actively writes with students, sharing the challenges they have when writing in their everyday life. I take the same approach in my classroom by composing alongside my students. If you have not composed before, take the plunge. Start improvising at a piano or experiment with the technology tools you will have your students use. As you compose, record yourself and keep a journal of your process of composing and the questions and challenges you have creating music. Be sure to make note of where and how you find solutions to your compositional problems, and detail the musical decisions you make. It can also help to share your work with students or colleagues.

In addition to personal journaling, there are a growing number of resources available that detail the processes students use to create original music. Research studies completed by classroom teachers studying their own students while composing, as well as books and articles written by professional composers who talk about their process of composing can help inform work with your students in ways that are both meaningful and educational.
Read books on writers’ workshop approaches to teaching writing. Books written by Donald Graves, Nancie Atwell, Ralph Fletcher, and Lucy Calkins are chock full of ideas that can be easily transferred to the music classroom. When reading these books, it is easy to translate the word “composing” for “writing,” and “listening” for “reading.” These substitutions transform these texts from books on teaching writing to books on facilitating student composing.

When your students start to compose, be sure to take time to observe their process. How are they creating? What processes are they using? Asking students about the intentions behind their compositions will help you to better engage them. Have them present their compositions to the rest of the class and make them responsible for discussing their process and musical decisions to encourage musical thinking. During their presentations, try to take on the role of student, learning from them how to better design mini-lessons to meet their needs as composers. Engaging students in creating their own music can be a transformative experience not only for the students, but also for the teacher.

As music education moves to embrace new models of creative musicianship, ideas from general education can help lead the way. The composers’ workshop provides opportunities for students, even those who don’t consider themselves ‘musicians,’ to experience the joys and possibilities of creating music within their own musical lifeworlds. The social setting, and the collaborative structure are different from the ways teachers typically teach band or choir, and these differences can enrich an already vibrant program.

The past few weeks have been very busy for me. I thought after finishing my last days at Cranbrook that my summer would afford a bit more free time…. I was wrong. I’ve been busy not only preparing for our move to Terre Haute for my new position as assistant professor of music education at Indiana State University, but also getting ready for my course Podcasts, Blogs, and Wikis…Oh My! at the Central Connecticut State University Summer Music Institute and for my upcoming presentations at the ISME conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I had a little bit of a scare earlier this week when my CCSU class was potentially going to be cancelled, but SMI director Pam Perry worked her magic and the course is still running!

I’m really excited to teach at the CCSU Summer Music Institute and share some of the successful projects I’ve done over the past year with podcasts, blogs, and wikis at Cranbrook and also as part of a collaborative composing project with my colleague Steve Bizub and his students at Nishimachi International School in Tokyo, Japan. Blogs, podcasts, and wikis have enormous potential for enhancing the learning experience for our students. Having students create podcasts of original compositions including interviews of their peer’s compositional process was quite a highlight of all of my classes at Cranbrook last year. It was also quite interesting to have students contribute to an emergent encyclopedia of composing using free PBWiki software.

I look forward to the class and helping other teachers enhance their teaching and their students’ learning with these tools!

Welcome to my blog. Over the next few days I will be updating this site with links and other content related to music education. I hope you visit and comment often.